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Cablegate

A new study finds that a tool used to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on behalf of whistle blower Web site Wikileaks may, itself, leak the identity of those running the software.

Twitter has suspended the account used by Anonymous, an umbrella group of online hacker-activists that have claimed responsibility for denial of service (DoS) attacks on Visa, MasterCard, Paypal and a host of other public and private entities who have taken action against Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

Another day, another flurry of media reports stemming from the ongoing leak of sensitive diplomatic cables by the Website Wikileaks. Reports have surfaced that the group is in disarray now that Wikileaks chief Julian Assange was denied bail by a UK court, even as hacktivists try to take down the Web sites of individuals and corporations that have been pulled into the scandal.

The
Washington Post is reporting that Petty Officer Bryan Minkyu Martin was
arrested sometime last week on suspicion of stealing classified documents from
military networks and attempting to sell them to a foreign agent.

OK. It’s been just over a week since information leaking Web site Wikileaks released the first installment of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, with each day bringing new documents from the purported hoard of some 250,000 pages, and new developments from a range of very pissed off Western governments.

Information leak Web site Wikileaks put out a call for volunteers willing to help the organization host its controversial documents. Claiming that the site was “under heavy attack,” Wikileaks posted an appeal on its Web site looking for individuals willing to help mirror the contents of Wikileaks now infamous Cablegate documents on a physical or virtual server. Within hours the site’s content was being mirrored at over 500 locations, according to a list provided by Wikileaks.

The Pentagon says the leak of diplomatic cables was an unforeseen
consequence of its policy to encourage information sharing. That’s
nonsense. When it comes to its failure to protect classified data, Uncle
Sam’s been warned before.

It was difficult to go anywhere this week without hearing about the flurry of activity surrounding the Wikileaks data dump. A slew of denial-of-service attacks followed soon after, while new ransomware and attacks on open-source software filled out the rest of the week’s news. Read on for the week in review.

The Web site of Wikileaks was moving quickly to stay out of the way of large scale denial of service attacks on Sunday and Monday, following the release of a trove of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables. The controversial site, which has spent months trying to find a home secure from government seizure, now appears to be hosted on servers that are part of U.S. firm Amazon.com’s giant hosted Web Services infrastructure based in Seattle, Washington.

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